April 14, 2007

ARE CELLPHONES killing bees? My guess is that this will turn out to be hysteria, but stay tuned.

UPDATE: Hey, somebody should look to see if bees are doing better in the National Radio Quiet Zone.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steven Den Beste emails:

The claims in that article about cellphones and bees sound like the global warming hysteria, up to and including the predictions of apocalypse.

For instance, there was this claim: "Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees."

That's wrong. Corn, wheat, rice, rye, barley, and all the other grain crops do not rely on insects for pollination, and they make up the majority of the calories consumed by the human race.

It's true that there are a very large number of crops which do rely on insects, but many of those do not rely on honey bees, or at least do not have to. In many areas, they use a different kind of bee that looks a lot like a honey bee but is much different in life cycle. These bees don't produce honey, and all the females are fertile, with each producing 5-10 grubs. They work collective laying sites with the grubs being placed in holes in wood.

In the wild they use dead trees, but the farmers that rely on them put up boards with holes drilled in them for the bees to use.

Honey bees are important, but the current problem doesn't mean the human race is going to starve to death.

I'm not sure, but I think that this may be a picture of a carpenter bee. The article also quotes Albert Einstein on honeybees -- kind of like quoting Norman Borlaug on black holes. Smart guy, but . . . .

MORE: A more skeptical take:

Many beekeepers are skeptical of the reports or at least how they're adding up. For 100 years, beekeepers have logged periodic reports of sudden and inexplicable bee die-offs.

People refer the latest die-off by its initials "CCD," but one Georgia beekeeper instead calls it the "SSDD" crisis for "Same Stuff, Different Day."

"People have lost bees from the beginning of time," Sowers said. . . .

Most empty hives have been discovered at large, commercial migrating bee farms - and that has led some beekeepers to theorize that it's the stress of being trucked cross-country that's killing the bees.

"The (bee's) instinct is to go out and collect pollen and nectar, and that's what they do. When they can't get out of the hive, it puts them under stress. They need to go to the bathroom on a regular basis, but they won't go in their hive," said Ken Ograin, an Elmira beekeeper. . . .

Finally, beehives simply die. Scattered reports of large-scale mortality date from 1915, 1960 and 1987. Scientists don't always know why.

"This may be a repeat of that situation where we simply don't figure it out," said Morris Ostrofsky, president of the Lane County Beekeepers Association.

In fact, some farmers say they are puzzled about the dire news stories appearing in local, state and national media in the past several weeks.

"It's not new this year," Williams said. "If you know what I mean."

Media hysteria? It's just possible that might be involved. (Via Slashdot, which also features other skeptical comments on this story.)

STILL MORE: Skepticism from an entomologist.

I'm not ready to rule out the cellphone connection, but I'd have to say that it's far from compelling at this point. I do think people should check out the Radio Quiet Zone. Plus, via Boing Boing, a Snopes entry casting doubt on the Einstein quote. Not that it matters much one way or another -- Einstein was a smart guy, but as far as I know he had no special expertise on the subject of bees.

JAMES ZUMWALT ON THE "FLYING IMAMS," IN THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Some security experts suggest the imams’ conduct may have been intended to identify aviation security weaknesses. Their John Doe lawsuit tends to support this theory, as such a complaint can also serve to manipulate our legal system to silence those who might otherwise report suspicious activity.

Anyone in the security business knows that if a passenger exhibits suspicious behavior before takeoff, he or she cannot be allowed to board — or remain on — the plane until that behavior has been satisfactorily explained or otherwise resolved. Post-9/11, anyone entering an air terminal should be sensitive to this need and should work in a cooperative spirit to remove any suspicion.

Nothing can prevent a passenger who believes he has been wronged by the screening process from filing a lawsuit. What is outrageous is to hold good Samaritans liable simply for doing what any reasonable person observing suspicious activity should do. This is pure and simple intimidation.

In the interests of national security, Congress cannot allow this to happen. While the House has taken the initiative to insert protective language in a public transportation bill, that bill does not go far enough. Such protection needs to be comprehensive, extending to the public at large rather than just those using airplanes or other public transportation.

I doubt Zumwalt chose the title that his oped runs under, though, which is "Witnesses for the Persecution."

ANOTHER ARGUMENT for making Randy Barnett the next Attorney General! Hey, they should have listened to me.

UPDATE: The Barnett Juggernaut gathers momentum! "Randy has my full support! He'd be a major improvement over both the incumbent AG and his recent predecessors." Indeed.

TOM MAGUIRE is typing through the tears.

MORE PEOPLE ARE FEELING THE PINCH OF THE ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM TAX.

Plus, Fred Thompson on taxes.

WHO WILL NANNY the nannies?

UPDATE: Related thoughts here:

How could the chief executive of a state routinely put the chief executive of his state, elected by and responsible to the voters to discharge his duties for a full term, at risk of death or injury for something so self-indulgent as not wearing a seatbelt? Not to mention that a governor has some duty to model responsible and rational behavior. If the motor pool were found to have neglected maintenance of the brakes or tires of a governor's vehicle, heads would roll, and rightly so. Apparently he routinely doesn't wear a belt: Corzine is not just being stupid, he's acted recklessly and put the welfare of his state at pointless risk, just as surely as if he decided to take up bungee jumping or Russian roulette while in office. This is really, really, bad behavior.

Bungee jumping would be an improvement.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some thoughts on why you should wear a seatbelt:

Go a little farther through the windshield, and it isn’t unexpected to leave some or all of your face behind stuck in the broken glass. You’d be surprised by how easily faces come off the facial bones.

You can also expect fractured wrists, arms, and shoulders, from folks trying to brace themselves.

A little farther through the windshield, all the way out of the vehicle (a situation we call “pre-extracted for your convenience”), and in addition to whatever damage you took on the way through, you get the damage from hitting the ground, trees, and metal poles at however-many-miles-an-hour.

Sure, you hear people talking about wanting to be “thrown clear” in the event of an accident. If you want to simulate being “thrown clear,” go to the fifth floor of a building and jump out the window.

Read the whole thing.

PREPARING FOR THE WORST: Getting ready for Internet terrorists.

HOW TO DRIVE A HYBRID without looking P.C. I should try that!

BILL WHITTLE LOOKS AT conspiracy theories.

GARY KASPAROV ARRESTED WHILE PROTESTING PUTIN: Ilya Somin has a roundup on this story. He comments: "Kasparov's arrest is not only an outrage in its own right, it is significant as an indicator of Putin's willingness to further tighten his authoritarianism. If Putin is able to get away with arresting even a world-famous opposition leader, less exalted opponents of the government can expect even harsher treatment. Hopefully, there will be enough of an international outcry to persuade Putin to desist and force him to tread more cautiously in the future. But it is hard to be optimistic about Russia's immediate political future after the experience of the last several years."

GRAPHIC EVIDENCE OF why it's dumb to sue bloggers. Or even threaten them.

UPDATE: Try googling JL Kirk now.

ABSTINENCE-ONLY EDUCATION doesn't do any good. I'm not surprised to hear this.

ANTI-ISLAMIST RALLIES IN TURKEY:

Chanting secularist slogans and waving Turkish flags, more than 300,000 people from all over Turkey rallied Saturday to discourage Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a conservative with an Islamist political past, from running for the presidency.

The demonstrators marched to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern secular Turkey in 1923, transforming the normally hushed venue into an unprecedented demonstration ground.

"Turkey is secular, it will remain secular", "The presidency's roads are closed to Sharia (Islamic law)", "An imam cannot become a president", they chanted, reflecting concerns that Erdogan and his Justice and Devlopment Party (AKP) are not truly committed to the mainly Muslim nation's secular system.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: InstaPundit's correspondent in Turkey, Claire Berlinski, emails:

I wasn't there, but it was definitely a state-run (i.e., nationalist, Kemalist) show. This was planned a long time ago. It doesn't necessarily mean much about what people are really thinking. By the way, the fact that Turkish nationalists are anti-Islamists should not lead anyone to conclude that they're Western-style democrats. Despite Erdoğan's Islamist past, one of the basic conflicts here is that he wants to open Turkish society. Here's a good discussion of this point. The demonstrators are concerned that Erdoğan isn't committed to secularism, probably for good reason, but Erdoğan's supporters are -- also for good reason -- concerned that the Kemalists' aren't committed to democracy.

Sigh.

A VERY NICE PHOTO, from Brittney Gilbert. When the weather improves, I've got to get out and take some more Tennessee backroad pics myself.

IN THE MAIL: Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior, by Dick Couch. It's got a foreword by Robert Kaplan.

NIFONG UPDATE: Quest to convict hid a lack of evidence. This damning quote from Nifong is about the impact of the case on his campaign is, well, damning: "I'm getting a million dollars of free advertisements."

STEPHEN F. HAYES SPENT SOME TIME WITH FRED THOMPSON and observes:

And by the end of the conversation, two unexpected realities had emerged. If he joins the race for the Republican nomination, and if he campaigns the same way he spoke to me last week, Fred Thompson, a mild-mannered, slow-talking southern gentleman, will run as the politically aggressive conservative that George W. Bush hasn't been for four years. And the actor in the race could well be the most authentic personality in the field.

Read the whole thing, which starts here.

JL KIRK UPDATE: Here's a TV news story from Nashville's Channel 2.

Plus, more bad experiences with JL Kirk. I can't say I'm surprised at this development.

UPDATE: There's a mistake in the video, which I corrected in the comments, but apparently not everyone is scrolling down and noticing. Fernando Colina emails:

They call you a “former professor of law.” Something we don’t know? Something YOU don’t know?

I hope that it is either a mistake, or that you finally finished your new villa overlooking the reef at Grand Cayman, built from the proceeds of Instapundit Inc.

It's a mistake. I'm still here. No villa in Grand Cayman, alas. But I like being a law professor too much to quit anyway, even in the face of something like a major Powerball hit -- which InstaPundit ain't.

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS, from Jules Crittenden.

IF YOU HAVE -- or had -- BlogAds and your page is loading slowly, you need to remove the old proxy.blogads.com code from your templates. More here.

MORE THOUGHTS ON ADOLESCENCE AND MATURITY, from Megan McArdle. Interesting discussion in the comments, too.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: A recent National Journal article (sorry, link is subscriber-only) suggests that lobbyists are worried:

But beneath the surface there was a feeling of anxiety among the lobbyists gathered at Pentagon City's Ritz-Carlton hotel in Arlington, Va. They had their minds on a rule adopted by the House in January that toughens the process for winning -- and will likely restrict -- appropriations earmarks. Those are special-interest provisions, ubiquitous in recent years, in which members of Congress direct money to specific projects by inserting narrow, targeted language into spending bills.

Lobbying for earmarks has become a profitable business for many K Street firms. Weapons makers, colleges and universities, hospitals, municipalities, and many other clients pay lobbyists big fees to persuade the right lawmaker to include a pet project or favorite program in an appropriations measure.

The new rule is causing heartburn because it requires lobbyists and members to submit additional paperwork explaining and justifying their earmark requests. At the Murtha bash, said one lobbyist who attended, there was a lot of chatter about the "onerous documentation" now required of those seeking earmarks.

Beyond that, the lobbyist added, 2007 is shaping up as "a perfect storm for defense earmarks." In addition to the tougher rule -- intended to stop ethical abuses that have given earmarks a bad name -- the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing budget constraints that are sure to reduce the number of defense earmarks in this year's spending bills.

This is a time of uncertainty for lobbyists who have prospered by capitalizing on the booming earmark business in defense as well as other industries and economic sectors. "We're warning all our clients that they have to be realistic in their requests in terms of dollars," said Stewart Van Scoyoc, who attended the Murtha event and is the founder of the 17-year-old firm whose name is often linked with earmark lobbying.

This is music to my ears. Let's hope the "perfect storm" is as perfect as we can make it.

April 13, 2007

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: Snow won't dampen global-warming rallies.

UPDATE: A reader asks if this means global warming is bogus. No. Here's a good quote from the article:

"I think that's an easy excuse, but if we're really reasonable about it, we're not talking about individual weather on individual days," Locke said. "We're talking about something much larger, on a global scale, which science has been tracking for decades."

But keep this in mind when they start claiming, as the press inevitably does, that unusually warm days are evidence for climate change. The truth, as I've noted before, is that weather is very "noisy," and that warm (or cold) days, weeks, or even years don't mean much. And by pointing out the cold weather now, you get people to go on the record about that . . . .

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA LAW PROFESSOR JOSEPH KENNEDY looks at possible criminal charges against Mike Nifong:

Obstruction of justice is a felony in North Carolina if it's committed with the intent to deceive. The state bar has accused Nifong of intentionally excluding the exculpatory DNA results from his expert's report and of subsequently misleading the trial judge as to their existence. If Nifong really intended to deceive the judge and the defense in order to prevent the introduction of those results into evidence at trial, he committed this felony.

Read the whole thing. It's unusual for prosecutors to be prosecuted, to say the least. There are good reasons for such reluctance -- not wanting to second-guess often-difficult decisions. There are also bad reasons -- self-dealing in the prosecutorial biz. But the Nifong case is also unusual, so I suppose prosecution here is possible. His behavior certainly seems to have been outrageous.

UPDATE: Some Nifong FAQs from Dean Barnett.

FINANCING THE INSURGENCY: Alaa has thoughts.

"THE DON IMUSES OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT:" Some of them even wore hats.

UPDATE: Tim Lambert says some of the quotes are fake.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In response, Lambert is called a serial misrepresenter. I've found him to be unreliable in the past.

FOLLOWING UP ON SOME OF MY EARLIER POSTS regarding Letters of Marque, here's an article on privateering from Alex Tabarrok.

UNCLE LEO'S MEDALS: Eric Muller notes an astonishing conclusion to his family story.

ACTUALLY, I FIND THIS A BIT SCARY: "American Girl" fans mob Dick Cheney.

Kinda like the final chapter of The Diamond Age. . . .

MARKOS IS ALSO UNHAPPY with the DNC's RIAA relationship.

HONESTLY MISSING IMUS: "I did indeed appear on the show once when I was promoting my book, and I was, in all honesty, very happy to do it, because his show did move books."

That's okay. There are other book-moving venues!

"SCALPING STANDARDS" FOR THE BLOGOSPHERE? Daniel Glover writes:

In my years of blog-watching, I have been amazed at how quickly today's online watchdogs are to drop the f-word. I'm not talking about the one banned on the airwaves by the FCC; I'm talking about the one spelled f-i-r-e-d, or its face-saving sister, r-e-s-i-g-n. Nary a scandal, real or imagined, goes by without some blogger on the right or the left demanding that so-and-so resign or be fired if he refuses to go quietly. . . .

But every controversy does not warrant a firing or a resignation, and demanding as much runs counter to another goal of many bloggers: candor and transparency in politics.

Yeah, people make the jump pretty quickly from criticizing someone to demanding that he/she be fired. As I've noted before, that's usually overkill.

THE DEMOCRATS' FIRST 100 DAYS: Well, not everything was divisive:

Nine of the seventeen are bills to rename post offices and courthouses, which appears to be a bipartisan process--one of them is the 'Rush Hudson Limbaugh Courthouse.'

Insert "ditto" joke here.

UPDATE: The GOP folks are quick off the mark with a video retrospective. How did people do politics before YouTube?

UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT: I just noticed that K.C. Johnson has a book coming out on the Duke Lacrosse case, coauthored with Stuart Taylor. I'm sure it will be worth reading.

I CALLED THE WALTER MURPHY STORY THE 2007 VERSION OF THE NANCY ODEN STORY and that's looking to be the case.

Hell, I've got a better claim than Murphy over an air travel incident. After all, Rush Limbaugh spent several days denouncing me last fall for my saying the Republicans didn't deserve to win the elections. Obviously, I was bumped from this flight as a kind of underhanded payback. And on the return leg, my seat wouldn't fully recline. . . . .

MARY KATHARINE HAM puts on a peep show.

THE TALIBAN APPARENTLY BEAT UP THE WRONG DRAQ QUEENS, and wound up being attacked by angry drag-queen-defending villagers.

TAXES TOO HIGH, BUT FAIR. Hmm.

THE DEMOCRATS ARE NOT GETTING ANY LOVE from Cory Doctorow: DNC appoints RIAA shill to run Public Affairs for convention. I don't find this quite as shocking as Cory does, but it certainly illustrates the closeness of those two operations. Not that the GOP has been willing to stand up to the RIAA much, either, even though it would seem to be in their interest.

I MENTIONED BEFORE that Nashville blogger Katherine Coble is being represented by the Media Bloggers' Association with regard to the JL Kirk / King & Ballow libel threats. Bill Hobbs has posted a copy of the letter.

More thoughts here.

THE ANALOG HOLE IS WORTH 24 CENTS: It's amusing to me to be reading about the "analog hole" from a guy named Ohm. But then, I'm a geek.

WHAT HATH IMUS WROUGHT? "As of 1:06 PM (EDT), 82% of 6,873 people casting votes in the America Online poll agree that Rosie O' Donnell should be fired."

STARTING SOON: A Bathrobes for Brian movement!

MEN JUST WANT TO have fun.

SOME MEDIA CRITICISM ON THE SURGE from John Wixted -- plus actual numbers!

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer has a related column. Excerpt:

By the day, the debate at home about Iraq becomes increasingly disconnected from the realities of the war on the ground. The Democrats in Congress are so consumed with negotiating among their factions the most clever linguistic device to legislatively ensure the failure of the administration's current military strategy -- while not appearing to do so -- that they speak almost not at all about the first visible results of that strategy.

Read the whole thing.

FOLLOWING UP ON LAST YEAR'S RAZORBLOGGING, I should note that a couple of weeks ago I got a nice gift -- a fancy shaving brush, some upscale brush-style shaving cream, and a razor handle that uses the Gillette Fusion blades I use anyway.

Using the brush is kind of fun, actually, and to my surprise both the Insta-Wife and Insta-Daughter say that it leaves my face noticeably smoother. (Insta-Daughter: "Your five o'clock shadow looks more like two o'clock now.") I don't know if it's because the brush raises up the whiskers or if the overpriced shaving cream is actually worth the money. Either way, it was a nice gift.

AFTER ALL THE FLAK HE GOT for his Belle Meade mansion's energy use, Al Gore is installing solar panels. Ecototality has a report, and photo.

A WHILE BACK, WE DID A PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH MISCHA BERLINSKI about his novel Fieldwork.

Now Stephen King, writing in Entertainment Weekly, says that he loves the novel but that the publisher has managed to bury it:

This is a great story. It has an exotic locale, mystery, and a narrative voice full of humor and sadness. Reading Fieldwork is like discovering an unpublished Robertson Davies novel; as with Davies, you can't stop reading until midnight (good), and you don't hate yourself in the morning (better). It's a Russian doll of a read, filled with stories within stories. . . .

Why, why, why would a company publish a book this good and then practically demand that people not read it? Why should this book go to waste?

More thoughts here. It is a good book, and I highly recommend it too.

TERRORISTS IN SPACE? Well, sort of, as the Tamil Tigers hack Intelsat. Rather a black eye for Intelsat.

AN IMUS PROBLEM FOR THE DEMOCRATS?

Equally important, Imus gave Democrats a pipeline to a crucial voting bloc that was perennially hard for them to reach: politically independent white men.

With Imus' show canceled indefinitely because of his remarks about the Rutgers University women's basketball team, some Democratic strategists are worried about how to fill the void. For a national radio audience of white men, Democrats see few if any alternatives.

Don Surber comments: "Here’s an idea: Go on Fox News. Oh, Daily Kos won’t let you."

Heh.

UPDATE: Eric Scheie thinks this was a mistake.

JOHN TAMMES rounds up news from Afghanistan that you may have missed.

MICHELLE MALKIN GETS CALLED A "PROSTITUTE" ON THE AIR: No doubt there will be an Imus-like groundswell of outrage.

J.D. JOHANNES' IRAQ DOCUMENTARY, OUTSIDE THE WIRE, showed at Washington State University. Here's a blog report on how it went.

UNDERSELLING CAPITALISM? "Capitalism is the villain in Barber's piece, yet capitalism has proven time and again to be the singular cure for the poor health threatening the Third World. According to the 2005 Economic Freedom of the World report produced by the Cato Institute, the nations in the top quintile of average per-capita GDP also have the highest average life expectancy; 77.7 years versus 52.5 years for citizens of countries in the bottom quintile."

IS THIS TRUE?

The terms of the immigration debate have turned less friendly for illegal immigrants as lawmakers and the Bush administration struggle to reach a deal in the next few weeks. . . .

time it's Democrats - eager to show they can lead - whose fissures are on display.

In an ironic twist, the outlines of a potential deal have moved to the right - toward a more difficult road to citizenship for the nation's roughly 12 million illegal immigrants - even as the power in Congress has shifted to Democrats, who overwhelmingly favor a more permissive approach.

When I was on Hugh Hewitt's show the other night, both he and Mickey Kaus -- who follow this issue more closely than I do -- seemed to feel differently.

MICKEY KAUS: "Howie Carr condemned Imus? If memory serves, Howie Carr's radio show was the most offensive radio program I'd ever heard when I listened to it during the 2000 New Hampshire primary--more offensive, in terms of ethnic insensitivity and general sneering inhumanity than anything I've seen attributed to Imus's broadcast."

The Imus pile-on features even more flaming hypocrisy than is usual for such things.

April 12, 2007

ENJOYING THE FIGHT, and cheering on both sides.

CATALLARCHY: GUILT VS. INNOCENCE: "Why we care." Plus an interesting observation in the first comment.

DRM, LOCK-INS AND PIRACY: "Red herrings for a music industry in trouble"?

PENN & TELLER ON GUN CONTROL: Video here. (Via Dave Hardy).

WOLFOWITZ DROPS THE BALL at the World Bank: Austin Bay has thoughts.

TOM MAGUIRE: The audacity of outrage.

UPDATE: HO-POCRISY.

ANDREA PEYSER wants the New York Times to apologize to the Duke Lacrosse players. Plus this: "But the biggest losers may be the ones you'll never hear about. These are the genuine victims of sexual assault: women who don't fabricate tales of brutality, or seek out the richest, whitest men to falsely accuse of forcing them into sex. Who will believe a rape victim now?"

UPDATE: More on the Times' coverage: "The worst journalist covering the case was the New York Times’ Duff Wilson."

BLOGOMETER: "If you ever wanted proof that Dems are more in love with their own idea of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) than what Obama actually is, you need look no further than a poll of MoveOn.org members following their online Townhall on Iraq forum." Meanwhile, Kos loves Bill Richardson.

I KNEW THIS WAS COMING, but it's still cool:

Private space exploration took a potentially significant step forward this week as Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace announced plans to send a series of inflatable space stations into orbit over the next decade.

The spacecraft, initially designed by NASA for use with the International Space Station, would be available to train astronauts from nations not currently active in space, as well as companies that could manufacture unique products in weightlessness. . . .

The announcement comes at a heady time for private space entrepreneurs. The rocket company SpaceX, founded by Pay Pal billionaire Elon Musk, had its most successful test launch to date last month. Voters in New Mexico this month passed a referendum to raise taxes to help build a spaceport for Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism company.

Bigelow already has a prototype of its planned station in orbit and is scheduled to launch a second on a Russian rocket later this month. The prototype Genesis II will launch from Orenberg, Russia, and will carry a payload that includes a Madagascar giant hissing cockroach, scorpions, an ant farm, and an internal camera to watch their acclimation to space. The first Bigelow vessel designed to house a human crew, called Sundancer, is now in development and is scheduled to launch by the end of 2010.

I wish them luck.

AN AL QAEDA INDICTMENT IN OHIO:

A federal grand jury has indicted an Ohio man on charges of conspiring with the al-Qaeda terrorist network to bomb targets overseas and in the United States, possibly using remote-controlled boats and aircraft.

The grand jury in Columbus returned a three-count indictment yesterday against Christopher Paul, 43, who prosecutors said received training at terrorist camps in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, joined al-Qaeda and later trained co-conspirators in Germany in the use of explosives. The indictment was announced today by Justice Department officials in Ohio and Washington. . . . From 1989 through the present, the Justice Department said in a statement, Paul participated in "a conspiracy to destroy property overseas and murder and maim persons located outside the United States." As part of the alleged conspiracy, it said, he provided money and equipment to individuals abroad and trained co-conspirators in the United States to prepare them "to fight violent jihad overseas."

On the other hand, this sounds a bit thin:

In recent years, the statement said, Paul used Columbus residences to store items that included a laser range finder, a night vision scope, literature on explosives, "remote control items" and survival gear.

What red-blooded American doesn't have at least most of this stuff? Hard to tell how much there is to this story, but I suppose we'll learn more as it progresses.

RICHARD MINITER WAS THERE when the bomb went off in Baghdad today, and posts a report.

UPDATE: Video here.

DON IMUS FIRED: "It appears Don Imus may be finished in talk radio." I've never liked Imus, and his comments were disgraceful, but this seems like it's been a feeding frenzy. And, really, who cares what Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson think about proper public demeanor?

UPDATE: C.J. Burch emails:

Imus is fired, maybe that's a good thing, I don't know. I'm having a hard time reconciling that with the fact that Rosie O'Donnell still has a job, though.

And Barry Dauphin writes:

I've never really "gotten" the appeal of Imus among the (pseudo)intelligentsia. He's always seemed like a mean ex-drunk to me. But the idea that he's finished in radio is quite silly. He'll be back long before Sharpton shows contrition about the Duke rape case.

Well, that's probably true.

WOMEN'S HEALTH CLINICS IN AFGHANISTAN: An interesting slideshow at Yahoo News.

PELOSI'S POLLING:

Speaker Pelosi's approval ratings are far from disastrous. However, the most recent AP-Ipsos poll, completed on the day Ms. Pelosi met with Bashar Assad in Damascus, showed a 14 point drop in the Speaker's net approval rating since the last survey taken in mid-January shortly after her inauguration. The figures in January were 51% approval and 35% disapproval; last week's figures were 46% approval and 44% disapproval.

But she's polling favorably with fashion guru Manolo:

All the Speaker Nancy did was put on the scarf. It is not as if she was showing her cultural sensitivity to Islam by helping to stone the adultress, or giving the fifty lashes of vigor to the woman driver. It was just the scarf, the same sort of head covering worn by the Laura Bush when she visited the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, or by the Condi Rice when she visited the mosque in Tajikistan.

The Manolo has long thought that the Nancy Pelosi is one of the better dressed persons in Washington. She has the confident and the colorful personal style and dresses in the high quality, good-looking clothing that is appropriate to her position and age. In short she knows how to dress.

Read the whole thing!

ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?

Have you ever been experienced? "Wonder why so many of the news articles you read, or steam over, are lacking essential information or perspective? Wonder no longer. Knowledge and experience of the subject is only a 'plus.'"

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Meet the Proud Pork Men:

The arrogance of career politicians was on full display today when Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HA) took to the Senate floor to boast of his and Senator Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) long careers of accumulating pork on the backs of American taxpayers. In a tribute to Senator Stevens’ new status as the longest serving Republican U.S. Senator, Senator Inouye declared:

He and I received the crown of being pork men of the year. We are the number one add-ons in the United State Senate. Mr. President, I’m proud to call Ted Stevens my brother, and I hope that we can continue this brothership for as long as we’re here.

“It’s a sad day in America when the longest serving Republican in U.S. Senate history is praised by an even longer serving Senator for setting the record for fleecing American taxpayers of their hard-earned money,” Club for Growth President Pat Toomey declared. “After thirty-nine years in the U.S. Senate, one would have hoped that Senator Stevens would have accomplished something more meaningful than petty parochial pork projects like a $223 million “Bridge to Nowhere” and a $1.5 million bus stop.”

“Instead of heaping praise on the Senate’s worst porker, the Senate should impose the reform rules requiring 100% earmark transparency that it had unanimously passed earlier this year,” Mr. Toomey continued.

Despite the recent elections, the Pork Party remains in control.

LARRY KUDLOW: DON'T GO WOBBLY:

Although White House Budget Director Rob Portman told me on Tuesday’s show that there would be no compromise deal on the pork section of the Iraq funding bill, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) told me last night there could in fact be a deal.

Today’s Wall Street Journal also suggests a deal could be in the works. Apparently, rumors of pork’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Any compromise deal on this roughly $25 billion of pork would seriously dilute the President’s strong message that he’s been selling for nearly ten straight days in his constant criticism of the Democrats.

A little backbone from the White House, please?

MICHAEL YON: British forces at war, as witnessed by an American. "These soldiers are so good that I have requested from British commanders to be allowed to stay longer."

AN OVERSPENDING SCANDAL INVOLVING THE Washington, D.C. metro system? Who'd have thought it?

THIS IS INTERESTING: A Serenity and Firefly Fan DVD, with all sorts of outtakes, commentary, etc. It's kind of like the reels that Star Trek cast members used to show at conventions, only better produced and actually for sale. I have to say that Joss Whedon and Tim Minear certainly managed to get a lot out of a TV series that was only on for one season. And so have the fans!

The Glenn and Helen Show: Should Adolescence Be Abolished?

Are we infantilizing teens to the point that we are raising a nation of wimps? Is adolescence extended so long that people have gray hair by the time they become adults? Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts and author of The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen talks about these questions and more on today's podcast. Epstein's new book argues that adolescence is an artificial and unnecessary part of life that people are better off without. Find out how your teen's exposure to school and Western media may be setting him or her up for incompetence, poor judgement and social-emotional turmoil. What can you do about it? Read the book or listen to the podcast to find out. Or go take Dr. Epstein's competency test to find out how adult your teen is (or how adult you are) at www.howadultareyou.com or visit his website at drrobertepstein.com.

You can listen directly by going here and clicking on the gray Flash player, or you can download the file by clicking right here. You can get a lo-fi version suitable for dialup by going here and selecting lo-fi. And, of course, you can get a free subscription via iTunes -- and wouldn't you want to, really?

Music is "The High School Song" by Audra and the Antidote. This podcast is brought to you by Volvo Cars -- buy one and tell 'em it's all because of the Glenn and Helen Show!

UPDATE: Interesting discussion in the comments, here.

A "POWERFULLY CORROSIVE INTERNAL CULTURE" at the BBC.

THE DANGERS AND BENEFITS OF DRIVING A GAY CAR:

RON GEREN, an actor in Los Angeles, commutes to auditions and jobs throughout Southern California in a sleek black Mazda MX-5 Miata convertible. But for a recent date with a woman, he rented a Cadillac Escalade because he was so used to friends saying his Miata is “gay.” . . .

Meghan Daum, an op-ed contributor to The Los Angeles Times, wrote about a promising first date with a man that never led to a second one because, she later learned, the guy saw that she drove a Subaru Outback station wagon and concluded she must be a lesbian.

And when Joe LaMuraglia, the founder of Gaywheels.com, an informational site modeled on the likes of Autoweb.com, told his partner he wanted to buy a Mini Cooper convertible, the boyfriend joked that he would not be seen in it because the couple “would look like such a gay cliché,” Mr. LaMuraglia said.

Shockingly, it turns out that actual gay people drive pretty much the same cars as everyone else, though. And is the electric Mini Cooper gay, too, or just nerdcore? Not that there's anything wrong with that!

DON SURBER: "Am I alone in being disturbed by Barack Obama’s call for firing a broadcaster over something he said? This off-with-his-head mentality is unpresidential."

UPDATE: "Racism and sanctimony. Is there some way to get them to stop feeding off each other?"

ROB HUDDLESTON HAS MORE THOUGHTS on the JL Kirk / King & Ballow libel demand. He thinks they chose unwisely:

Yes, the practice of issuing demand letters as a way of getting what a client wants without having to resort to actual litigation is widely used. However, you can't treat every case the same. You need to know when something is going to be attractive to media - local, state, or (in this case) global. This goes for civil suits (as the one being threatened against Kat), criminal suits, and even juvenile cases (because the media can request access on certain hearings there, too). If this case is going to make the media take notice (taking into account that mainstream sources oftentimes are agitated to action by bloggers), then you have to be perfect in your actions.

I agree that this was ill-conceived. It has certainly done more harm to JL Kirk's reputation than the original post could have. And there's this: "Now, if you use Google Blog Search or Technorati, there are between 65 and 75 blogs posting on the incident and that’s only using the search term JL Kirk and Associates. . . . This whole thing wouldn’t have even been a blip on Google, but look where it is now."

I could have predicted that. Come to think of it, I did! And more than once.

UPDATE: There's nothing on their site yet, but I hear that the Media Bloggers Association is getting involved. This would seem to underscore Bill Hobbs' point that a demand letter making threats "will, almost with a certainty, generate severe blowback and damage the company's reputation far worse than the blog post that initially offended them." Likewise Justin Levine: "In my experience, the bigger the law firm, the less likely they are to understand how blogging culture has changed the landscape. These people don’t understand that a legal threat is far more likely to damage their client’s reputation, rather than repair it."

Indeed. Why, you could write a whole book on how this stuff has changed . . . .

Further thoughts from Rex Hammock. And, via Rex, this Better Business Bureau report on JL Kirk.

Still more here.

A PLUG-IN ELECTRIC MINI COOPER that you can buy right now if you like.

And no, it's not likely to pay for itself in gas savings. But it's kind of like getting a personal computer in the early 1970s -- you're doing it to be ahead of the technological curve, not because it really makes sense yet.

A LOOK AT THE DUKE CASE AND THE POSTMODERN NARRATIVE: "With the final outcome of the Duke rape idiocy, it is finally and fully apparent that the Duke faculty and administration have made fools of themselves. . . . It was obvious to normal people without an agenda a year ago that there was something fishy about the Duke story."

UPDATE: A good point from Howard Kurtz:

As long as we're talking about how the Rutgers women were unfairly disparaged as "ho's," consider the nightmare that the three Duke lacrosse players have lived through.

But in all the coverage you read and see about the clearing of these young men, very little of it will be devoted to the media's role in ruining their lives. I didn't hear a single television analyst mention it yesterday, even though two of the players' lawyers took shots at the press.

It was an awful performance, no question about it. News organizations took one woman's shaky allegations and turned them into a national soap opera, pillorying the reputations of the players. Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty and David Evans were presumed innocent in a legal sense, but not in the court of media opinion.

We will now read 100 stories about how an obsessive prosecutor overreached in bringing the indictments in the first place, and that's fine. But keep in mind that the Duke case was all over the network newscasts, the morning shows, the cable channels and the front pages. Newsweek put two of the defendants' mug shots on the cover. "I'm so glad they didn't miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape," Nancy Grace said on Headline News.

Nancy Grace's behavior was particularly bad -- and justly parodied on Saturday Night Live -- but she was merely one of a miserable herd. And, as noted above, the story was obviously weak.

Kurtz continues:

What made this a case of aggravated media assault is that news outlets weren't content to focus on the three defendants. Attorney General Roy Cooper said there was a "rush to condemn a community and a state." Remember all the "trend" stories about "pampered" and "privileged" student athletes being "out of control"? Remember how the lacrosse players' homes were shown on TV? How the coach lost his job? How this case was depicted as being about the contrast between a white elite institution and a poor black community? All of that was built on what turned out to be lies.

Once discrepancies surfaced in the account of the accuser--who has still not been identified by the MSM, even though she's now been exposed as a liar--some news organizations did a good job of pursuing them. But just about everyone joined in the original frenzy over race and sports. And given the media's track record going back to Richard Jewell, I have zero confidence that this won't happen again.

Imus will probably lose his show. Nancy Grace won't.

MORE: A lefty blogger wonders why people care. Aside from the obvious -- it's a manifest injustice in a case that got loads of publicity -- I think it underscores that the political/media system isn't living up to the standards of fairness it sets. In the conventional imagination, it used to be -- see To Kill a Mockingbird or reports of the Scottsboro rape trial -- that it was the noble fairness-obsessed lefties who supported due process against the ignorant right-wing hicks who tried to lynch people out of a mixture of racism, political opportunism borne of racism, journalistic sensationalism, and sheer meanness. Now the hats have switched. That's worth noting.

STILL MORE: Radley Balko:

But the reason why the narrative for most of the last century has been that of noble, left-wing ACLU and NAACP lawyers coming to the aid of black people wrongly accused by racist white people is because for most of the last century, that's the way it has actually happened. Over and over and over. . . . The right-wingers just happened to be right this time.

He's right about the history -- but I'm not sure this incident is as isolated as he suggests. And Jonathan Gewirtz comments: "My hunch, and this relates to my original point, is that while abuses of police and prosecutorial power probably happen everywhere, they are more likely to go unremedied in entrenched, one-party political cultures like those that exist in some of the so-called blue states."

SUICIDE BOMBER KILLS 3 at the Iraqi Parliament building.

STRATEGYPAGE: "More evidence is piling up that Iran has, as many intel specialists have long suspected, been supporting some Sunni Arab terrorist groups, as well as Shia Arab ones. . . . The movement of thousands of terrorist personnel from Baghdad resulted in many of them being caught or killed. In the last two months, three senior al Qaeda leaders have been caught, and over 500 terrorists killed or captured." Read the whole thing, and note the problems with corruption in Baghdad, which have been pointed out here before. While the Iraqi Army is doing much better, the police remain a problem.

EXTENDING COMBAT TOURS IN IRAQ: Austin Bay comments. When we talked to Army Secretary Francis Harvey about recruitment, retention, and combat stress issues he sounded pretty positive, but I was worried then and I remain concerned. The latest National Journal has an article suggesting that strains are worse than Harvey allowed, and that higher-ups in the military don't want to say so. It seems like a bad time to play games with -- and pork up -- the supplemental appropriations bill. Perhaps some of that sugar-beet money should go to equipment and retention bonuses.

MEGAN MCARDLE: "The real question about CEO pay is . . . who cares?"

And read this item on CEO pay, too. And is it just me, or is that reference to "young Ezra Klein" a bit patronizing?

JOE BIDEN ON DARFUR:

''I would use American force now,'' Biden said at a hearing before his committee. ''I think it's not only time not to take force off the table. I think it's time to put force on the table and use it.''

In advocating use of military force, Biden said senior U.S. military officials in Europe told him that 2,500 U.S. troops could ''radically change the situation on the ground now.''

I agree with the sentiment, though we're a bit busy at the moment. Perhaps Biden should make pushing for a larger military a top priority.

UPDATE: Reader Ed Stephens writes: "Tell Joe Biden to ask the Europeans. . . 'Why don't they have 2,500 troops to send to Darfur?' If an area w/300 million people can't raise that many troops, then perhaps it's time we have a discussion about 'free riding' with them."

Meanwhile, The Mudville Gazette characterizes his position as "Screw Iraq, Invade Darfur:"

The harsh reality is that once we abandon Iraq we're going to have to put all the newly available troops in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda certainly will, and their recruiting is going to soar. Ultimately we'll lose that one, too, because they won't quit knowing full well that we will.

Then we can go to Darfur.

Behind much of the absurd talk of the impact of Iraq on military "readiness" there's a Democratic talking point: "Because we are in Iraq, we aren't capable of waging a war somewhere else." That's valid to an extent (but absurd to a greater one), but a more complete translation is that "because we are in Iraq we aren't capable of executing a war that Democrats could hypothetically support, because Democrats are tough on national defense, by golly, and there are plenty of wars in places other than Iraq we'd prosecute to prove it".

That's disturbing, I'm concerned they would do so a bit too eagerly given the opportunity. Biden seems to be going that route - but he could just be paying lip sevice to it to earn the "hawk" (or "tough guy realist") appellation the media bestows on guys like Murtha. (The actual "go to guy" for Dems when it's time to cut-and-run. See Somalia, for example.)

I'm all for doing things about Darfur. But I don't believe Biden.

April 11, 2007

THE DEFINITIVE PLACE for followups on the Duke Non Rape Case is, of course, K.C. Johnson's blog.

UPDATE: Stuart Benjamin comments: "A defense lawyer (or a libertarian) treating this as a cautionary tale about the awesome power of a 'rogue prosecutor' to run amok is not a surprise. But an attorney general framing the case that way is more striking. Not that Nifong didn't deserve this drubbing — just that I wasn't betting on it."

DEBATING free speech on campus at the University of Wisconsin.

A FOLLOWUP ON BLOGS AND CIVILITY, from Tim O'Reilly.

TRANSFORMING IMUS INTO A CONSERVATIVE: But of course.

UPDATE: This was fast.

TOXIC PSYCHOLOGY.

I WAS ON HUGH HEWITT talking about immigration just now with Mickey Kaus. Some further thoughts can be found here.

But if you want to kill an immigration amnesty bill this year, there's an easy way -- get Lou Dobbs to run for President as a Democrat.

TENNESSEE BLOGGER THREATENED WITH LIBEL SUIT. The text of the demand letter is here. Some thoughts on why threats like this are usually a bad idea can be found in this article on libel in the blogosphere.

Brittney Gilbert, meanwhile, has a characteristically pungent response.

This statement in the demand letter suggests a lack of familiarity with federal law on the subject: "As the 'publisher' of your blog, you control, and are responsible for, the content appearing in it. References by persons posting to your blog to JL Kirk Associates as 'crooks' and its services as a 'scam' are equally false and defamatory as your own." If, as it seems to be, this is a reference to posts by blog commenters, it appears inconsistent with the Communications Decency Act's immunity provisions. Perhaps, however, I misunderstand the argument.

UPDATE: SayUncle thinks this was a bad move: "They’ve probably done more damage with this than her original post did."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Hobbs: "As for JL Kirk Associates, if I was in the job market - and, as it turns out, I am - I wouldn't use them. Not because of what Katherine Coble wrote, nor because of what I found about them via Google, but because they and their law firm decided that threatening to sue a blogger to squelch criticism was a better business tactic than addressing problems that may exist with how they do business."

It's already made the News-Sentinel.

MORE: Uh oh.

ORIN KERR ON THE WALTER MURPHY NO-FLY STORY:

I realize that Professor Murphy honestly and genuinely feels targeted. And it's true that Professor Murphy is an academic giant; he's he author of many major and important works, including one of my favorite books, Wiretapping on Trial. At the same time, I'm increasingly finding this story rather embarrassing. At this point it sounds to me like much ado about nothing, perhaps just a story of miscommunication or what happens when bored American Airline clerks in Albuquerque decide to have fun with a distinguished gentleman flying to Newark.

Walter Murphy sounds like 2007's version of Nancy Oden to me. More on that story here.

NOW HERE'S AN IDEA: "Of all the possible Chrysler Group buyers with billions of dollars burning holes in their pockets, there is only one who has a chance of saving the troubled automaker AND our greenhouse-gassed planet: Al Gore. . . . He should buy Chrysler, which parent DaimlerChrysler put up for sale in February, and make it the greenest automaker on the planet."

(Via Tom Elia).

DUKE CHARGES DISMISSED: Hot Air has the press conference video. And a transcript. Key bit: "We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations. Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness, we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.”

C.J. BURCH EMAILS: "Did Bill Quick take over Hugh Hewitt's blog?"

HERE'S A REPORT ON the blogger conference call with John McCain.

And here's another from Mary Katharine Ham, who notes that McCain says he'd continue to hold blogger conference calls as President.

Hey, the path to the Presidency leads through the blogosphere!

UPDATE: Another report from Ryan Sager.

And here's a review of McCain's speech on the war at VMI, and the conference call. David All blogged the conference call, too.

Plus, Ed Morrissey and New Hampshire blog GraniteGrok. And the Bull Dog.

NOTE: Mary Katharine Ham link was bad before; fixed now. Sorry!

STILL MORE: Another report, from Fausta. And a roundup, here.

THE REST OF THE STORY:

Monty Johnson was heading home Monday with a cooler full of catfish when he learned his new neighbor had turned him into a minor celebrity.

The first calls on his cell phone came from two lawyers asking to represent him in a slander case. Elizabeth Edwards, they told him, had called him a "rabid, rabid Republican." That wasn't all. The Democratic presidential candidate's wife also told The Associated Press she didn't want her children near Johnson because, she said, he once pulled a gun on workers investigating a right of way on his property.

Johnson, a 55-year-old retired landscaper with arthritic knees, said he's not interested in suing.

"I'd just like to know why she has such hard feelings to me," he said. "They say they're for poor people." . . .

Johnson thinks the Edwardses don't like him because he put up a sign along Old Greensboro Road that reads: "Go Rudy Giuliani 2008." The couple has to read it every time they pull into their winding driveway.

He also left an abandoned house facing their property. But he said he was born there and doesn't have the money to fix it up or the heart to tear it down. . . . "I think she owes me an apology," he said. "And I won't feel right until I get it. If this is how they treat people in the White House, America is in for a helluva time."

Another not-so-smooth PR move from the Edwards operation.

COMPARING THE DUKE NON-RAPE CASE with the Imus imbroglio.

TWO OF MY FAVORITE PEOPLE: Ed Driscoll has a big Don Imus / Katie Couric roundup.

A MAJOR MCCAIN SPEECH ON THE WAR will be streamed live here at 1:30 Eastern today.

JOHN ONDRASIK interviews Mike Huckabee. Our earlier efforts to win Ondrasik over to the podcasting world seem to have worked.

THREATENING SPYWARE DISTRIBUTORS with prison.

Just turn 'em over to their victims . . . .

XENI JARDIN IS BLOGGING FROM WEST AFRICA, and she lists some African blogs that were new to me.

MAX SAWICKY: Clinton saves, but Nixon invests.

IN THE MAIL: Harry Helms' Top Secret Tourism: Your Travel Guide to Germ Warfare Laboratories, Clandestine Aircraft Bases and Other Places in the United States You're Not Supposed to Know About.

FRED THOMPSON LYMPHOMA: Elephantbiz has a roundup. Doesn't sound like a very big deal, but stay tuned.

TIM MINEAR'S NEW SERIES DRIVE premieres on Fox Sunday. We talked to him about it, along with lots of other things, in this podcast.

SPACE: THE NEXT FRONTIER FOR ADVERTISING?

California Rep. Ken Calvert, ranking Republican on a House Science subcommittee overseeing NASA programs, surprised an industry conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., by announcing plans to introduce a bill that would make “NASA space assets available for commercial advertising and marketing opportunities.” If that ever becomes law, companies and universities might be able to market themselves by plastering logos on equipment or sponsoring equipment such as cameras on the International Space Station.

The revenues, ultimately reaching perhaps $100 million, would be used to build up a self-sustaining prize fund to honor space innovations by entrepreneurs. Calvert said his aim is to increase public awareness of manned space exploration programs without spending taxpayer money. The congressman suggested it could evolve into “an advertising system” similar to those used by public radio and the Smithsonian Institution “which have long-term, dedicated and tasteful sponsorship” arrangements.

Interesting idea.

IMUS WITHOUT MOURNING: But with a David Gregory angle! "When he comes back, Imus will be on a short leash. So, does this mean he will never vex another NBC Newser with questions about their role in the Plame debacle? That is great news for Tim Russert and David Gregory. . . . So, will a newly chastened and compliant Don Imus let this topic go?"

Plame? I vaguely remember something about that. . . .

THERE'S STILL LOTS GOING ON IN UKRAINE, and Veronica Khokhlova continues to write about it.

HAVE THE DEMOCRATS FINALLY FOUND a rogue regime they won't negotiate with?

UPDATE: Ouch: "When congressmen place a 'fisheries disaster mitigation fund' — that is protecting fisheries — at the same level as protecting our soldiers in the battlefield, we have problems bigger than pork barreling. Far bigger." And don't forget sugar beets!

HOWARD KURTZ: "Katie Couric did a one-minute commentary last week on the joys of getting her first library card, but the thoughts were less than original. The piece was substantially lifted from a Wall Street Journal column. CBS News apologized for the plagiarized passages yesterday and said the commentary had been written by a network producer who has since been fired."

So Katie didn't plagiarize, because the piece that appeared under her name was actually written by someone else, not her! "Genelius said it is 'very common' for the first-person commentaries to be put together by staffers without Couric's being involved in the writing, but that she does participate in topic selection."

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER, but this should have happened many months ago: "The office of North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper will announce that he is dismissing all charges against three Duke Lacrosse players, ABC News has learned from sources close to the case."

LaShawn Barber has some thoughts.

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY'S BOOMSDAY gets a positive review over at The Politico.

April 10, 2007

NORM GERAS defends political blogging.

JONAH GOLDBERG: "Conservatives, don't ignore McCain." I don't know if conservatives will listen or not.

I liked McCain personally, but it's hard to forgive him for McCain-Feingold. That's hurting him with a lot of people. On the other hand, his stance on the war is helping him with a lot of people.

HEALTH CLASS WITH Professor Obama.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON NUCLEAR POWER AND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY:

The environmental movement has so far utterly failed to develop a coherent approach to replacing carbon producing power sources. Wind and solar are not such a coherent response without a massive breakthrough in battery technology, because variable sources are inadequate to provide base-load power. Also, they too have negative externalities: wind kills birds and destroys views, and many solar panels are loaded with gallium arsenide, a highly toxic substance that is apparently rather tricky to dispose of.

All this wouldn't be so bothersome if the environmental movement merely failed to provide realistic alternatives, but in fact, many environmentalists actively move to block new wind installations (I'm looking at you, Robert jr.) and nuclear power plants, spread hysteria over nuclear waste, and otherwise actively work against the cause they are trying to advance. As such, it is perfectly legitimate to demand why they are blocking the only things that have any realistic chance of replacing carbon-emitting power plants.

The answer, in my opinion, is that too many environmentalists flunk basic and economic knowlege, which is why so many people believe it is practical to replace a coal-fired turbine that pumps out 1,000 megawatts with a solar installation that will, in peak sun conditions, produce about 1 kilowatt per 150 feet of space, twelve hours a day; or wind farms, which average less than 1 megawatt per turbine in prime spots.

Read the whole thing.

EVERY SINGLE TALK-RADIO PROGRAM I'VE LISTENED TO over the past couple of days was talking about Imus. Seems like overkill to me, but Jonathan Martin at The Politico makes a good point:

More than anything, though, the incident strikes me as a set piece not unlike many of our recent political firestorms. In fact, it feels eerily similar to the scandal Sen. Trent Lott found himself in in 2002.

Like Imus, Lott made racially-charged, if at least more subtle, comments in a very public setting that few picked up at first. But, fueled by blog attention, the story made its way into the mainstream media. Lott, like Imus on Thursday's show, was also initially dismissive of those who were offended and the lag between the incident and the story prompted many allies to also stick with their leader. But after the heat intensified, and the story became "a story," Lott's friends in the GOP went south. Just the same, MSNBC and CBS issue tsk-tsk statements on Friday, only after the AP became interested in the matter, but made no attempt to dump their star. As Rev's Sharpton and Jackson dialed up the outrage, though, the network folks suddenly became more outraged.

I was an early Lott critic in that affair, but I have to say that nothing he said compared to Imus's remarks -- and if Trent Lott had talked about "nappy headed hos" and the like, I think it would have become a scandal a lot faster. But read the whole thing.

HILLARY CLINTON, USMC?

MORE THOUGHTS ON BLOGGING ETIQUETTE from Cory Doctorow.

UPLOAD YOUR MIND: A look at brain-implant chips:

Srinivasan explains that the chip is sending electric pulses through the needle into the brain slice, which is passing them on to the screen we’re watching. “The difference in the waves’ modulation reflects the signals sent out by the brain slice,” he says. “And they’re almost identical in frequency and pattern to the pulses sent by the chip.” Put more simply, this iron-gray wafer about a millimeter square is talking to living brain cells as though it were an actual body part.

Ted Berger, Srinivasan’s boss and the mastermind behind the tangle of coils and electrodes, has arranged this demonstration to provide a small but profound glimpse into the future of brain science. The chip’s ability to converse with live cells is a dramatic first step, he believes, toward an implantable machine that fluently speaks the language of the brain—a machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.

Remedying Alzheimer’s disease would, if Berger’s grand vision plays out, be as simple as upgrading a bit of hardware. No more complicated drug regimens with their frustrating side effects. A surgeon simply implants a few computerized brain cells, and the problem is solved.

This would be cool, though not without its downsides. I've had some thoughts on this stuff here, here, and here.

THOUGHTS ON PICKING BIOTECH STOCKS, from Derek Lowe.

OUCH.

AN ANTHRAX SCARE right here in Knoxville. Just a prank, apparently.

OMAR FADHIL HAS another report from Baghdad.

IT'S NOT JUST THE ARAL SEA: Rand Simberg points out another wetland restoration project that somehow hasn't gotten as much attention.

IS FEDERAL CAMPAIGN FUNDING dying on the vine? Dave Weigel thinks so. And he's okay with that.

FRANK J. OFFERS a comment policy for a better blogosphere.

POPULAR MECHANICS tests and rates compact fluorescent bulbs. Interestingly, the GE bulbs that I like are only middle-of-the-pack, which I regard as good news rather than bad. I'll try to get hold of a few of the top scorers and see how they look to me.

A WEAK TURNOUT FOR SADR IN NAJAF: Plus, a more laudable protest in Kabul.

FREEMAN DYSON: "The western academic world is very much like Weimar Germany . . . . It is amusing to see China and India take on today the role that America took in the nineteen-thirties, still believing in technology as the key to a better life for everyone."

IN THE MAIL: A signed copy of John Scalzi's The Sagan Diary. But it came addressed to Helen, because she recorded one of the chapters in the audiobook version. Oh, well -- it's still a free Scalzi book!

I KNOW BUDDY EBSEN as Jed Clampett or (worse) Barnaby Jones. I know he was a dancer originally, but seeing his fluid movements in this sequence was still kind of a shock.

LAPTOPS IN THE CLASSROOM: A discussion post over at Above the Law.

I'm not convinced that they do much to advance learning -- every once in a while a student will look something up that furthers class discussion, but it's hardly a daily occurrence. Often the other students will IM answers to whoever I call on, which is fine with me as it means that more people are thinking about the answer than just whoever's in the hot seat. But generally I think it's a waste of time. I don't object much, though, as they'll just have to deal with similar distractions once they've graduated. This is practice, and the grades will reflect who's better at it.

LOTS OF DISCUSSION OF WHAT AN EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT WOULD DO, over at the Volokh Conspiracy. Ilya Somin comments: "If enacted today, the ERA would have a number of effects that many political liberals will deplore, including abolishing affirmative action for women and cutting back on key aspects of Title IX. It might also have some results that they would approve of, such as potentially undercutting bans on same-sex marriage. To my mind, the effects that liberals dislike are more likely to arise - at least in the short term - than those they will applaud. Affirmative action for women and Title IX gender balancing have considerably weaker political support than the restriction of marriage to opposite sex couples, and are therefore more likely to be struck down by politically savvy judges interpreting the ERA."

Follow the links at the bottom of Somin's discussion to see the other Volokh posts on the subject. I support the E.R.A. and I'll be interested to see how its political evolution occurs in light of this kind of consideration.

CONGRESS'S APPROVAL RATE: Still lower than Bush's. And disapproval is higher.

I think there's an overall loss of faith in America's political class, which seems to me to be largely warranted.

UPDATE: Don Surber looks on the bright side: "But Congress is doing better than a year ago when the spread was 27-65. At this rate, Congress will go from hated to just disliked by 2009." Yay, team!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dems will be touting this AP poll, which shows Congress at a sky-high forty percent approval! But I don't think that undercuts my thesis. When approval is well below 50% -- and, as Surber notes, disapproval is 57% -- we're talking about a slightly lower level of public contempt, not actual approval.

MORE: Bob Krumm looks at another poll and comments: "When two of the top three vote getters in a presidential poll are undeclared candidates who have both been out of politics for half a decade, I’d say he’s right."

STILL MORE: The Influence Peddler notes: "approval ratings under 50% are absolutely the norm, and under 40% aren't especially unusual."

Yes, as I say there's a long-running problem with America's political class, that's being obscured by today's partisan bitchfest.

FINALLY: More fun with polls from Tom Elia. And Jay Reding observes: "Attributing this to a general loss of faith in America’s political class is right. The President is isolated and has become almost a Nixonian figure. Nancy Pelosi is trying to pretend that she’s the President and Rep. Tom Lantos is arguing that the Democrats have their own foreign policy, the Constitution be damned. The basic problems that affect most Americans — the economy, health care, education, all of them go without any real solutions from Washington."

MORE ON MUGABE, from James Kirchick:

But the past two weeks have seen a further deterioration in the situation. Reports are scarce because of a ban on foreign press entering Zimbabwe. Suspected opponents of Mugabe have been abducted and tortured, and a cameraman suspected of smuggling out video of the violent crackdowns has been murdered. This state-sanctioned violence has been only a piece of a new defiance emerging from the Mugabe regime; last week the state-controlled newspaper, the Herald, warned the British political attaché in Zimbabwe, Gillian Dare, that she risked "going home in a body bag."

It has become de riguer among the press to call on South Africa, the regional power and, at present, Zimbabwe's lifeline, to act. Newspapers ranging from the Los Angeles Times to the Wall Street Journal have reprimanded South Africa for its silence and complicity in Mr. Mugabe's crimes. These remonstrations are necessary and right, but no matter how much international outrage there is over the horrors of Zimbabwe, there is little hope that South Africa will ever do anything close to what the West wants it to do.

I'm afraid that's right. The Zimbabwe situation is just another example of the impotence, and corruption. of the "international community."

PATRICK LASSWELL SHOPS THE SOUK IN SULIAMANIYA, IRAQ and posts a report with photos and video.

DO NEWSPAPERS HAVE A "SWEEPS WEEK?" Because this week's New York Times Science section is all about sex.

But don't miss John Tierney's column on Seinfeldian flaw-finding in the dating market.

April 09, 2007

IT'S NOT ALL BEER MALBEC AND SKITTLES CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ANGELA DAVIS: So I got home from the happy hour, and barely had time to put up the post below before I had to go to the hospital and pick up the Insta-Mother-in-Law. She's been battling a postoperative infection since she broke her leg and they nailed it back together again, and has a gadget to suck the pus out and another to inject steady quantities of top-shelf antibiotics. The latter broke, and she had to go have it reinstalled. I took her home to the "independent living" center, where the door refused to open with her key and there was no one around to let us in, necessitating that I stage a daring penetration of their airtight security. That took about five minutes -- I'm no "Slippery Jim" DiGriz, but their security isn't designed to stop his likes, either -- and I got her wheeled into her apartment. No more blogging for me tonight. See you tomorrow.

SO WE HAD THIS MONTH'S FACULTY HAPPY HOUR at the Sapphire Bar downtown. I like the Downtown Grill & Brewery but Sapphire is kind of cool -- lots of chill music (Thievery Corporation, Zero 7, etc.) and smoke free, plus an excellent wine selection. And the various bizarro martinis for those who like that kind of thing.

It was fun, as always. We ought to hang out more often than we do, but I suppose we do pretty well considering that pretty much everyone has family, kids, etc.

A lot of people seem to think that faculty folks hang out in the faculty lounge sipping sherry. Alas, it's not true. But maybe we should.

So am I turning into Ann Althouse with all these pictures? I blame the camera!

DAVID BERNSTEIN: "I am somewhat overwhelmed by the absurdity of someone apologizing to Al Sharpton for making a bigoted remark, and then Sharpton not accepting the apology. Talk about glass houses! Imus should certainly have apologized for his remark, but not to someone with Sharpton's history."

THIS SEEMS TROUBLING:

Prices for farm produces are soaring, driven in part by demand for carbohydrates to manufacture ethanol fuel. This is good news for farmers in places like Latin America, who have seen their incomes grow in recent years thanks ot a global commodity boom, but bad news for consumers who are facing inflationary pressure--and hunger in some poor areas.

Biofuel made of food seems iffy to me. Make it out of waste, of course, and it's a different story, but that appears to be a lot harder. More on alternative fuels here.

LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES catch the regulatory bug.

PROPOSING A BLOGGER CODE OF CONDUCT:

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

Sounds like I'm ahead of the curve already! Though that sounds more like a commenter code of conduct, really. I certainly don't believe that deleting nasty comments is an assault on free speech. Commenters can always get their own blog -- why should they have a "right" to have their comments appear on other people's blogs. The downside, though, is that once you start deleting comments people will tend to hold you more responsible for any comments that you don't delete. I certainly think that this prediction will be borne out: "What I foresee is endless argument about the meaning of the terms in the rules and how the rules apply. These discussions will be tedious and full of self-serving assertions."

Meanwhile, a related issue involving the Yale Law Journal.

Plus a potentially lucrative opportunity for InstaPundit!

VARIOUS PEOPLE HAVE BEEN REQUESTING more law school patio scenes. I'm happy to oblige, though it's worth noting that this is from last week -- this week's weather isn't as good, thanks to the unseasonable cold snap that has brought us December in April across most of the Eastern United States.

It's also worth noting that there's more to the University of Tennessee than a pretty campus, nice weather, and happy students. But if you like the photos, here are some more that I took for the law school's website a while back. And here are some older pics from around campus. Plus, some video interviews of U.T. law students, too. Students at U.T. do seem happier than law students generally, both in my impression and in that of various people who have visited the campus.

TOM SPAULDING IS REHEARSING WITH AEROSMITH: "It's a little odd that the very band that inspired me to play guitar, and therefore eventually become a tech is now the band I work for. It's very cool that they continue to inspire me 30+ years later."

MORE ON THE TROUBLES AT SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY, from Cathy Young:

The SFSU flag-stomping case continues this trend. It also seems to bear out the charges of double standards. Four years ago, the university took no action when the campus was plastered with posters that showed soup cans with pictures of dead babies and labels reading, "canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license."

She also observes: "It's hard to tell whether the selective deference to Muslim sensibilities stems from a politically correct regard for a minority group or from fear of violent protests."

MORE BAD PRESS for the new Democratic leadership as a result of Pelosi's trip.

THIS IS INTERESTING:

Over half of Europeans would support a preemptive military strike to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, a poll released last week by a London think-tank reports.

But they don't want to spend more on the military. Obviously, they want the United States to make the strike.

Plus, then they can criticize us after the fact. Win-win-win!

USA TODAY is piling on Imus. I'm with the Lady Vols fans -- his comments about Rutgers were pathetic. That said, this is a bit of a feeding frenzy.

A FRED THOMPSON ROUNDUP at ElephantBiz, where they're a daily occurrence.

MORE PORK-RELATED SCANDAL: "The scandal involving Gov. Jim Gibbons' ties to defense contractors broadened Friday with revelations that his wife was paid consulting fees by a company he helped to obtain federal contracts while in Congress."

IS "CRIMSONISM" the new Orientalism?

SMART, YET SOMEHOW SELF-DEMEANING: 2008 candidates buying each other's names on Google AdWords.

MICKEY KAUS: "When all four guests on the Chris Matthews Show agree on something, it is by definition CW--therefore the CW now holds that an immigration bill will pass and be signed into law this year, perhaps without many Republican votes."

MARY KATHARINE HAM SPEAKS TRUTH TO POWER. Always outnumbered, but never outgunned. . . .

UPDATE: Easier video link here. While I agree that the venom aimed at Michelle Malkin has largely been ignored by the usual spokespeople for civility, I do think that it's especially notable when a tech-blogger gets such nasty comments. But as Claire Berlinski noted in our interview, she's seen that sort of thing on the long-distance running chatboards. Lots of people are jerks on the Internet, especially when they can be anonymous, and especially when they feel that being a jerk builds credibility with the people they side with.

THOUGHTS ON IRAN:

Suppose that upon entering Iraq, our troops had uncovered a nuclear facility in which Saddam had 1,000 working centrifuges, another 2,000 about to come on line, and manufacturing capacity to produce yet more centrifuges? Would anyone have argued at that point that the invasion had been unnecessary? Do any Democrats deny that Iran does in fact have all of this capacity right now?

In the debate to come over Iran’s nuclear capacity, there will be constant references to our intelligence failure in Iraq. The dispute will be about exactly how close Iran is to a bomb. But let no one forget that Iran is already at a point that would easily have justified the overthrow of Saddam. This fact, by itself, does not decide the issue of what to do about Iran.

No, but it does suggest that we should be taking the problem more seriously. Everyone says that a nuclear-armed Iran is intolerable, but they mostly seem inclined to tolerate it rather than actually do anything, and even mild suggestions about doing anything are treated as beyond the pale. The likely consequence of this squeamishness and sloth, of course, is that when things come to a head more people will die than if we took effective action now. But that's likely to be beyond the next election cycle, which puts it beyond the time horizon of most politicians.

THERE ARE TWO AMERICAS: One America fears its less-wealthy neighbors because they are different. The other does not.

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE: Reader Mark Martin emails with a question about the camera I've been using lately:

Quick question, Professor Reynolds....

I need a camera that makes good photographs of small things---for me, bacterial colonies on a petri plates (which are about a millimeter or so in diameter). I noticed that you have been doing some "macro" photography with your Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T10 camera. How detailed CAN you get with small objects, with that camera?

It's one thing to read reviews. You tend to SHOW what you can do with a camera, which I find valuable.

I'll understand if you have too much on your plate to answer. If you could show off the macro abilities of your Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T10 camera in a post, I would really appreciate it.

Here it is -- this is a dime, which more than fills the frame on the "macro" setting, uncropped.

Hope that helps. And yeah, the dime's kind of boring, but I didn't have time to do any Rick Lee -style produce-blogging.

UPDATE: Several readers also point out that you can get a USB digital microscope surprisingly cheap.

NEWT GINGRICH: Gonzales should go.

UPDATE: Paul Mirengoff isn't so sure: "I will shed no tears if President Bush decides to sack Alberto Gonzales. But Gingrich's suggestion that the adminstration can get a fresh start with a new Attorney General is silly. The Dems aren't declining to cooperate with the Bush Justice Department because Gonzales mishandled the firing of eight prosecutors. They are making a mountain over this molehill because they wish to undermine the Bush Justice Department."

GOOD QUESTION: "Under Bush, unemployment dropped to numbers seldom seen — far below the Clinton years. Clinton’s people counter with well, the stock market took off when he was prez. Wait a second, aren’t Republicans supposed to be the Wall Street guys while Democrats are the blue collar guys?"

UPDATE: Meg Kreikemeier emails:

Just to clarify the Washington Examiner piece about the unemployment numbers during the Bush and Clinton adminstrations. The White House was quoted comparing the unemployment rates at similar points of expansion. The Clinton Adminstration did have lower unemployment rates than the current low of 4.4% for the Bush Administration as this data shows from the BLS.

That said, the current economy is strong despite a cataclysmic terrorist attack, a devastating hurricane, high gas prices and incessant, negative reporting. As I'm sure you can imagine, chronic negative reporting does affect the public's opinion even when the facts belie the media's and politicians' misrepresentations.

The media and naysayers will always try to find something negative to focus on like the increase in wages last year, which they complained didn't exist until long after the labor numbers supported the trend, and which are now channeled into inflation worries.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts from Jonathan Gewirtz:

The stock market didn’t take off until 1997, after the Republicans won a House majority and passed a capital-gains tax-rate cut that Clinton, to his credit, signed. But like welfare reform, another popular initiative that Clinton had no choice but to go along with, it was an essentially Republican idea that Congressional Democrats blocked as long as they could. And now that we are again enjoying a strong economy and stock market, in part because of Bush’s 2003 capital-gains tax-rate reduction, Democrats who want to raise taxes by canceling that tax reduction want us to believe that Clinton was solely responsible for the late-’90s boom.

I think that this gives Clinton -- and Bob Rubin and Gene Sperling -- too little credit. Clinton's economic policies were quite good, and if the Clinton Administration rode the tech bubble a bit too long and hard, well, so did a lot of other people who should have known better. In particular, the Clinton Administration's pursuit of free trade, against considerable opposition from people on the left, was both brave and correct.

MORE: Note Gewirtz's update, though he says it doesn't affect his point.

A LOOK AT THE RATHER IFFY HISTORY OF CARBON-TRADING IN EUROPE:

In some ways, Europe's program has been a success. It covers 45 percent of the continent's emissions, 10,000 companies and 27 European Union countries. It has built registries that list carbon dioxide emissions for every major plant.

In other ways, the approach has been a bureaucratic morass with a host of unexpected and costly side effects and a much smaller effect on carbon emissions than planned. And many companies complain that it is unfair.

Nice idea in principle, but highly prone to cheating and obfuscation when put into practice. Lots more on this at Hit and Run.

HAMID KARZAI says that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been defeated. Hope they figure that out, too.

FRED THOMPSON: Another Ronald Reagan?

That's clearly what some people are hoping.

RICHARD MINITER IS IN ISTANBUL, looking into the Asgari disappearance.

DEPTH AND EMOTIONALITY: Bred out of the straight white males who control the press? So is that why men are turning to the Internet instead of, say, Joni Mitchell?

STEVE CHAPMAN says the Equal Rights Amendment has already happened:

One supporter of the revived amendment is Democratic State Rep. Lindsley Smith of Arkansas, who told The Washington Post, "The question I get most frequently is, 'Lindsley, I thought this already was in the Constitution.' " What she overlooks is that, for all intents and purposes, it is.

In the last three decades, the Supreme Court has handed down a string of decisions overturning laws that treat people differently on the basis of sex. It required the all-male Virginia Military Institute to admit females, ordered the Air Force to provide the same dependent benefits to spouses of women as it provides to spouses of men, and struck down an Oklahoma law setting a different drinking age for men and women.

These decisions (and others) grew out of the same principle, that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the 14th Amendment.

Actually, that's why I'm inclined to favor passage of the ERA. To the extent it locks in antidiscrimination and universalizes it, it reduces the likelihood that courts and agencies will depart from the principle when they think it politically correct, or politically expedient. Chapman, on the other hand, fears just the opposite -- that an ERA will open things up to massive judicial activism.

HOW LONG CAN FRED THOMPSON WAIT? In the Wall Street Journal (free link) Christopher Cooper says not too long. I wonder if that's really true, though -- with campaigns moving at Internet speed, and individual donors assuming more importance, I suspect you can go from zero to sixty faster than in the past, and that lock-ins of support don't mean as much.

WALTER MURPHY ON NO-FLY LIST?

My theory involves a disgruntled Beethoven fan at Homeland Security. . . .

(Link added later, as some weren't getting it.)

UPDATE: Reader Joe Murphy emails:

Prof. Reynolds: I am also on the no fly list, even though I am a right-wing military contractor.. It comes with the territory of having an incredibly common last name. All it means is I have to check in personally and have my ID looked at; and that I am tabbed for "random" screening on a regular basis.

Even though I fly about 25 times a year, its a pretty small sacrifice compared to what our brothers and sisters overseas are going through!

Walter Murphy must be from the hysterical part of the Clan if he thinks this is directed at him personally. The airport agents and TSA folks manning the floor don't have the slightest idea why someone is added to the list. And no one has any idea how to get off it!

That would seem to undercut Prof. Walter Murphy's rather self-important claim that he's being persecuted for his anti-Bush opinions. On the other hand, a dragnet that catches everyone named Murphy isn't very impressive.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Progress on eliminating the "Road to Nowhere" in Tennessee and North Carolina, thanks to newly elected Democratic Rep. Heath Shuler:

Former Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., strongly favored the road and secured $16 million in Congress to resume construction. That money in 2000 was the beginning of an environmental study that is still not complete.

What's happened now is that Tennessee and North Carolina members of Congress have presented a proposal in a letter to the Interior Department, suggesting a final decision within 90 days. This final decision, according to the letter, would mean not finishing the road and using the $6 million left over from the environmental study for a down payment on the financial settlement with Swain County.

The united front among the congressional members from Tennessee and North Carolina is due in part to the fact that Rep. Heath Shuler, D-N.C., defeated Taylor in November. Shuler grew up in Swain County a mile from what popularly is called the Road to Nowhere, and he won the election in part by strongly opposing the road and favoring the settlement.

"This letter asks for a reasonable settlement which will maintain the undisturbed wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and save the American taxpayers millions of dollars," said Shuler, a former University of Tennessee and National Football League quarterback.

In Tennessee, Sen. Lamar Alexander, who grew up in Maryville near the mountains, also is a strong opponent of the road.

It's never seemed like an especially good idea to me. And yes, this is more evidence of how piggishness on pork helped cost the GOP control of the House.

April 08, 2007

AMBIVALENCE ON IRAQ, at the Huffington Post.

MOVING beyond carbon offsets.

MICKEY KAUS is "eerily prescient."

MEASURING "LAW STUDENT QUALITY" with the LSAT: but not well.

LES JONES liked Shooter.

UPDATE: Rob Port, not so much.

BIZZYBLOG ON THE TRIBUNE CO. SALE: "I believe that the sale of The Tribune Company last week to investor Sam Zell is an unrecognized low-water mark in the newspaper publishing business. In fact, after subtracting the value of the Tribune’s non-newspaper properties from the deal, what little value remains indicates that the value of having access to a newspaper’s readers is a mind-boggling 70% less than it was a mere seven years ago."

UPDATE: Doc Searls says that Zell is "clueless." And see this from Rex Hammock, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: William Beutler: "Not only does Zell have no idea what he’s talking about, he has no idea what he’s doing."

This consensus almost made the contrarian in me want to bet on Zell. But only until I read the interview.

ADVICE ON HOW TO CHOOSE A LIGHT BULB from the Washington Post. (Thanks to reader Silvio Florito for the tip).

I continue to be happy with the fluorescent bulbs described here. I've now replaced something like 20 bulbs in the house, and continue to replace the old incandescents as they fail. I've used both the 75-watt equivalents and the 100-watt equivalents. So far, none have failed.

ZERO TO SIXTY IN 3.1 SECONDS in an electric-powered race car.

PREGNANT ST. PAUL WOMAN OKAY, after fending off robber.

THIS SEEMS RIGHT TO ME: "Speaker Pelosi's adventure in Damascus has cost her a lot of political capital."

But not with the Angry Left that dominates the Democratic party today.

N.Z. BEAR: "It is one thing to have an opposition party (call them 'loyal' or not) who is actively opposing the particular strategies that the administration in power is taking to achieve victory for America's goals. It is quite another thing entirely when the opposition becomes fully and totally invested in failure. That is the choice that the Democratic leadership has made, and regardless of what the outcome in Iraq and in the 2008 elections turn out to be, the country is worse off because of it."

CARL LEVIN VS. HARRY REID ON THE WAR: "We're not going to cut off funding for the troops. We shouldn't cut off funding for the troops."

A NICE EASTER LAMB RECIPE.

Here's my recipe. And speaking of recipes, here's my recipe for pasta with tomato, basil, and chevre sauce. Easy, quick, and good!

AN EMAIL FROM BAGHDAD.

1235 MILES IN ONE DAY: The longest drive I ever did was Amarillo to Knoxville, which is just over 1100. I suppose I could have driven further, but I was extremely happy to be done when I got home.

ERIC SCHEIE IS standing up for secularism.

A STORY OF HEROISM DROPPED because the BBC found it "too positive."

The corporation has cancelled the commission for a 90-minute drama about Britain's youngest surviving Victoria Cross hero because it feared it would alienate members of the audience opposed to the war in Iraq.

That says it all, doesn't it? (Thanks to reader Amit Singh for the link).

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh isn't sure about the Telegraph's sourcing on this story -- a fair point -- but adds "appalling, if true."

LESSONS OF HEART DISEASE: Learned and ignored. "Medical research has revealed enough about the causes and prevention of heart attacks that they could be nearly eliminated. Yet nearly 16 million Americans are living with coronary heart disease, and nearly half a million die from it each year. . . . In many ways, scientists’ hard-won and increasingly detailed understanding of what causes heart disease and what to do for it often goes unknown or ignored."

DEFINING STALINISM DOWN: Eugene Volokh notes a rather silly remark from Rush Limbaugh.

APRIL SNOW in Richmond. I don't think it's really Al Gore's fault, though.

UPDATE: "Since when is 'Let it Snow' an Easter song?"

Does this cold weather disprove global warming? Nope. And hot weather this summer won't prove its existence, either. For that matter, no particular spell of weather proves or disproves any climate theory -- something that press reports tend to miss. Hence the fun in posts like these!

MORE: Apparently Al Gore's mysterious powers are shared by others. Can anyone acquire the coldening mojo? If so, a solution is in sight!

And here are some further thoughts on how the press handles the topic. In a word, badly.

MORE STILL: Ah, it is the "Gore Effect" at work, in a way, as the cold snap happened just as ABC News launched a series on global warming. If we can just harness this coldening power for good, who knows what we can accomplish?

STILL MORE: Global warming hits Cleveland.

ARE WE DOOMED? So the three top things that Amazon was touting to me when I visited their main page today were:

Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes;

Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse; and

America's Bubble Economy: Profit When It Pops.

It's like they're reading Bill Quick's blog, or something! I worry about this stuff. Of course, it's when Larry Kudlow writes a book along these lines that I'll really start worrying . . . .

WAR AMONG THE PEACE ACTIVISTS: "With allegations of money mismanagement, threats of court action and some members leaving, a group that has sponsored war protests in President Bush's adopted hometown has been anything but peaceful."

UPDATE: A very different kind of mom talks about the war.

IT'S BETTER THAN THIS WEEK! The latest Corn & Miniter Show is up!

A LOOK AT BMW'S HYDROGEN POWERED 7-SERIES HYBRID: And it can run on ordinary gasoline, too. Video at the link.

HILLARY'S INEVITABILITY vs. Obama's audacity: "It may not be showing up in polls just yet. But the people who pay the most attention -- the activists, the super-hyper-progressive bloggers who give money and encourage their friends to give money -- certainly are gravitating toward Obama."